`You think it's dead but the past ain't stopped breathin' yet," says the philandering preacher John Pearson in Zora Neale Hurston's novel "Jonah's Gourd Vine." And now, as though it were fulfilling that prophecy, the Library of America has published an authoritative edition of Hurston's works in two volumes: "Novels and Stories" and "Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings."

The first African-American woman to be included in the Library of America series, Hurston has been called a "cultural revolutionary" for her devotion to African-American folklife, which she studied as an anthropologist and celebrated in her art.

Neither her career nor life were trouble free-she never gained financial security, nor was she accepted as the visionary artist she was-yet Hurston overcame poverty and chauvinism to live life with style and gusto. Her vivid imagination, mastery of form and personal courage converge in these two volumes, meticulously edited and annotated by Cheryl A. Wall.

Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891, in Notsulga, Ala., the fifth child of Lucy and John Hurston. Seeking broader opportunities, her parents moved to Eatonville, Fla., outside Orlando, a town not only founded and incorporated by African-Americans but also governed by them. John Hurston served several terms as mayor and wrote many of the town's laws. He was also a carpenter and a preacher of statewide fame.

Lucy's life was filled with the work of raising eight children, and she diligently worked with them on their school work and strove to further their individuality. As Hurston recounts in her memoir, "Dust Tracks on the Road," her father was not comfortable with his wife's parenting techniques and was irritated by Zora's rambunctious nature and sassy tongue.

Zora cultivated an internal joy and appreciation for flowers, trees, the swamps and creatures of Florida. This was complemented by her experiences in the church, the gatherings of laughing, tall-tale-telling folk at Joe Clarke's store and the stories told in her home.

When Zora was 14, her mother died. John Hurston was unable to cope with the loss; his relationship with his children collapsed. To Zora, with whom he had never been close, this severing of family ties was and unforgivable sin. Forced to leave school, she had to fend for herself.

As she states in "Dust Tracks on the Road": "I wanted family love and peace and a resting place. I wanted books and school. When I saw more fortunate people of my own age on their way to school, I would cry inside and be depressed for days, until I learned how to mash down on my own feelings and numb them for a spell."

Aspiring to more than the drudgery of being a domestic, Hurston joined a traveling vaudeville troupe as a maid. Once in Baltimore she managed to enroll in Morgan Academy to complete high school. She was 26, but age would be no deterrent. She cited her birth year as 1901; the life of her dreams had begun.

A dogged determination to seek the horizon is a theme that frequently surfaces in Hurston's fiction, and that impulse marked her life as well. By 1919 she had moved on to Washington, D.C., to attend Howard University (while a student at Howard, she published her first stories). And within 10 years of her inauspicious arrival in Baltimore, she not only was admitted to Barnard College as their only African-American student, studying anthropology with Franz Boas, but also was on the way to the center of the intellectual and literary worlds of New York and the Harlem Renaissance.

Her friendship with Harlem Renaissance elders Charles Johnson and Alaine Locke opened doors for her to the white world, where she worked for and became friendly with novelist Fannie Hurst and others. But it was in her interchanges and collaborations with her black peers-especially Langston Hughes, with whom she worked on the play "Mule Bone"-that she found artistic inspiration and communion.

In 1925 Locke published Hurston's "Spunk" in his anthology "The New Negro." "Spunk" is set in an Eatonville-like village, and its plot centers around the supernatural folk beliefs of the villagers. Her ear for dialogue and black language is already well-developed; as "Spunk" and "John Redding Goes to Sea" document, there is no finer "dialect" writer than Hurston.

Seeking financial help, in 1927 Hurston entered into a complicated relationship with a patron, Charlotte Mason, with whom, Hurston wrote, she developed a "psychic bond." Mason's support would cease in 1931, but the terms of the contract Hurston had signed with her gave Mason proprietorship of the folklore Hurston collected, limited how Hurston could use and where she could publish the material and even restricted with whom she could work.